Okay so this has been open for very long because this is probably the most eccentric suggestion we have ever considered, and as such, it has been subject to many discussions, but ultimately I think this should not be done. This is going to be a long-ass comment so I will include a summary at the top, so if you only wish to know the reasons why we decided not to accept this, but do not care about the rationale and thought process behind those reasons, I refer you to this TL/DR:

1) The sale was already outdated when (originally suggested)

2) The purchase includes a decent amount of payments that shouldn't be considered part of the deal (or of which it is uncertain whether they should be)

3) The buyout cap in USD as is done here is highly unusual, and poses problems (especially when combined with (4))

4) The sale took half a year to complete, resulting in very large discrepancies and uncertainties regarding USD/key ratios, as well as uncertainties regarding the value of other items involved

5) Sales that take half a year to complete (from the moment the trade is agreed upon to the moment the last payment is made) are almost always outliers and/or include hard-to-define additional payments to account for the time lost (similar to paying in installments in real-world situations).

It resold a few days ago which is far lower than this sale, further confirming this sale was an outlier.

For the full rationale, refer to the explanation below.

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Note that everything that follows has been considered before the new sale arose, so many points made still assume this is the only sale.

1) Let me start off by stating the obvious: this sale was already outdated when it was first suggested (taking into consideration the original suggestion date, not this one). This was the initial point of discussion since granting leeway in regards to that 3 month threshold (resuggestions notwithstanding) has led to people pushing the boundaries of what would still be acceptable to a point where it became really arbitrary and therefore near impossible to justify why we would accept one suggestion, but would reject another. First, we accept something that is only a day too old, as that could not possibly do any harm. Then that day turns into a few days, which is not much more than that one day. And more and more we saw suggestions 1-2 weeks overdue, and people were like "but this 6 day too late sugg was accepted, why not this 7 day too late one?" (only 1 day more, and before we saw that 1 day could not do any harm).

Any new threshold we'd set (e.g. its fine as long as its within 7 days) would suffer from the same "but what harm can one day do" argument since that basically just pushes the threshold a week back.

Granting leniency towards this is therefore always carefully considered, and while I guess it would not have been an issue here, had it been the only controversy surrounding this suggestion, but the problems with this suggestion go way deeper than that.

2) Aside from the age issue, for a couple of payments, it is unclear whether or not they should be considered part of the sale, or it is very clear they should not be. For example, the first 75 key payment was denoted to be a reservation fee ("made to secure the hat", i.e. an assurance that it would be kept until the deal was complete). Such fees should not be included in the final price as they are an additional payment on top of the actual sale value to hold the item. This is something we have seen a lot on sales that had a buyout of 100, but sold for 105 (numbers are examples), where the extra keys were made to reserve the hat, implying such fees are generally not considered part of the sale. Then there is the scattergun, which on the other suggestion is noted as "an act of good faith", which implies it was never part of the deal, and that it was just randomly tossed in at the end. It is very hard to objectively verify if that should be part of the deal, and the more of this kinds of payments we see, the less accurate the sale becomes, not only because of the uncertainty surrounding those particular items, but who knows how much of the actual payment was done on good faith, as extra for keeping it for so long, or simply as a friendly exchange (the latter may not apply here but we see this a lot when it concerns sales between two friends).

3) Arguably the above does not matter due to the buyout cap, but that's another point here: there's a large difference between a buyout and an agreed-upon value. Buyouts are often denoted as the amount of keys one would take at any given time for the item (which is generally the listed price). Improper substitutes for this for suggestion purposes include pure amounts the items have been offered on (and to an extent therefore also agreed values in cases where the seller offered "would you do X keys?"), which are technically not buyouts but for suggestion's sake they can sometimes be used as a pure indicator, and as such, as a value cap (or - currently more commonly - as an indication a sale is really an outlier). Using such caps is a last resort already, but here it comes with more problems.

An issue with this 'buyout' is that it is in cash, particularly because - as mentioned above - it is not an actual buyout, but an agreed upon value. A buyout in keys is best usable as there is no question how many pure keys was expected (i.e. 400 keys is not ~380-420, it is exactly 400). Buyouts have since extended to listed values on Marketplace, for example, which are exceptional situations to put price tags on items where another form of a buyout is hard to pinpoint. An example of this is an item that was listed on MP for ages, and then sold for paypal (which has a lower usd/key ratio and will therefore almost guaranteed provide an inflated value. Such sales can then be capped at their marketplace listing and use MP key values instead of digging through paypal rates.

This has already led to issues in the past due to fluctuating key values on marketplace, where if something was listed while keys were $1.9 but sold when they were $1.8, should they then use 1.8 or 1.9? (For example when someone attempted to buyout drop something to 300 based on a MP buyout, but when it sold, the sale was 320 instead of 300 due to key/usd rate changes). The further you get from the solidified key value of your buyout, the larger the uncertainty of said buyout becomes. You'll see that paypal rates vary between sellers and buyers already, even on the same day. There are usually platform-related fees that could be paid by either party, which brings uncertainty, and moreover, there could be currency exchange fees which can take quite a hefty toll on the actual transferred amount. Are they part of the agreement? hard to say. Who paid them, and therewith the actual agreed sale value therefore differs from the paid value (and theoretically also with the agreed upon value, since if I want to receive X€ for my hat, the amount $Y will definitely translate to a higher key value than what I expected for my hat.)

This is something that applies to all paypal sales actually, and is a reason why we severely dislike using sales like that in general, but given no other choice we sometimes have to make do with what we have, and therefore occasionally accept paypal sales for suggestions, knowing that the value we see is guaranteed to be (far) too high. Putting all that burden on an agreed upon value in USD when the sale did not exclusively happen in USD brings along a lot more discrepancy than you may expect, but it is pretty evident from the agreed value and the total that the keys, USD, hats and whatnot that were actually paid are nowhere near the expected value, which proves once more the severity of the uncertainty indicated in points (2) and (3).

4) But then, does capping like it was done not solve that problem? The factual answer to that is ambiguous in this case, which actually brings us to the next point: the time it took for this sale to be completed. Note the subtle but extremely important difference between the time it took for the item to sell, and the time it took for the sale to be completed: the former is not really something that becomes an issue on rare item sales anymore (even though years ago we would not have considered sales that took a year and a half, as we cannot expect everyone to be that patient, but since over time we saw the market slowing down, and more and more people waiting for the right offer resulted in us eventually accepting even these sales, even though most of them are (realistically) outliers), but the latter most definitely does.

An exception to this would be if there was an agreed upon value in keys and a final sale in keys (because once again, the value of a key is always 1 key, so time does not factor in extra uncertainties), but sales using anything other than keys will suffer from this. Starting off with the USD value of the buyout here: there is an enormous difference between the key value of the agreed upon amount of USD between the moment the agreement was made and the moment the sale was completed; even on this value scale thats a substantial amount of several 100s. Then the question becomes: did the seller envision an amount of keys and named the amount of USD he wanted to cover that amount of keys, or did he want that amount of USD? In the first case, he'd have wanted more USD in the later steps to make up for the inflation over time, and in the latter case, the amount of key equivalents ultimately received would be much lower than the original agreement. Subsequently, this begs the question: should we take the key/USD ratio from back then, or from now? And the problem here is, that there is no objectively right or wrong decision here. There are arguments for both, resulting in a very large percentual uncertainty (which stacks with aforementioned uncertainties, so the overall margin of error blows out of proportion).

This problem is even worse when it concerns unusuals or other item payments that are not keys. For the brown bomber for instance: do you take the value at the time of the agreement? At the time it was given? At the time the sale was completed? Should it be valued as such at all, given that it was probably just the equivalent of X USD, and through that step, an equivalent of X keys? And in that case, how much was that? Any number slapped on that will be arbitrary unless it was directly sold to a buyer for X keys (solidifying its expected value in keys), and even then, it may directly contradict any original value agreement in not-keys (in this case USD). Had this sale been in hats only, it would have been an easy reject, because that alone would be more than enough to not even consider it to pass, but even with the amount of USD, the buyout in USD and all the uncertainties thóse bring to the table are - in the end - the main reason why I think this should not be done (stacking with the uncertainties of points (2) and (3)).

5) And the above is only considering the difficulties in appraising the sale, and not even how extraordinary a deal must be if someone is willing to wait half a year to get paid for a hat. The chances of a sale like this being an outlier (realistically) simply based on that fact alone are almost 100% already. If someone is willing to take a hat off the market for an amount of USD whilst still having to wait half a year for their payments indicates that they would not expect to sell it for that much (or anything even remotely close to that much) for half a year anyway, because otherwise you would have no reason to make such a deal where it is still perfectly possible for the other party to back out, other than potentially getting a free 75 keys (which pales in comparison to the profit that could be lost by waiting for a better offer, if one could possibly be offered in that time. Any suggestion with a single collectors purchase suffers from this extreme outlier potential, and deviates from the original stance we had years ago (where we would reason that if this were the right value, you'd probably have people fighting over your hat for this price after having it listed at that value for half a year), but this is a very extreme case of the collectors purchase exception (which we already only accept if there is nothing else, as anything else would probably disprove).

While on its own, this may seem like the weakest argument, it adds to the initial hesitance to accept something like this for sure, but real-world analogies may actually make this an argument suitable for rejecting solely based on this:

Say you have to spend money on something expensive; relatable cases may be the purchase of a car, tuition fees for a university, or a payment plan for a phone or phone subscription. You can generally decide to pay a large sum of money at once to get what you want, but since many people do not have such large amounts of money they can miss all at once, there is often an option to pay in installments instead, to spread the cost, and give you the time to earn the money necessary to purchase your desired item or service. Any such installment plan will have a combined value significantly higher than the payment, had it be done all at once. Phones sometimes have exceptions to this when you also get a monthly subscription to a service provider (sometimes even completely nullifying the cost of the phone), but result in you paying for that service for a set amount of time, ultimately still spending more money than you would have if you bought the phone itself and had gotten a more affordable service subscription.

Another analogy is a loan, where you effectively buy a sum of money, and have to repay that amount of money + interest after an amount of time.

In most of these cases the difference is that whatever is bought is instantly received, whereas here the hat was received after the payment, but the point that postponed payments or installments generally result in higher payments still holds even in this situation.

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For all of these points individually, I suppose I could be swayed to accept such a suggestion if they are the only thing blocking a price update (for some more easily than for others, though), but in this suggestion, there are simply too many grey areas, line crossings and playing jump rope with the rules to force an arbitrary value on this with an enormous margin of error far exceeding any acceptable limits, and as such, we've decided not to accept this suggestion.

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And then, yesterday (when I was originally going to leave this comment but something else came up) a new sale was brought to my attention:

It sold here for a stormy 13th salty + ~100

https://backpack.tf/profiles/76561198152373135#!/compare/1644537600/1644710400

While the salty seems to be in-date, it most definitely is not. The sale is actually 5 months old and its situation was already very iffy (with a cash sale, and the KS vive which wouldve been much lower). It was dumped to a bot immediately after and is currently for sale significantly below 1100 as well.

Other sales on that are the bot reselling it for ~750 maybe, and this bulksale that would be ~400 by very generous estimates if it were used in reverse

https://backpack.tf/profiles/76561198152373135#!/compare/1643241600/1643328000

Given that it was instantly flipped for pure, it should not be valued higher than what it was sold for to scrapyard (not what scrapyard sold for, but what they bought for) for the purpose of any suggestion on this salty dog, and it further confirms all suspicions that the sale used in this suggestion is a guaranteed outlier.